The Umeå Lunar Venture Innovation Fair is happening and it’s an open event for everyone. Bring your friends and come and meet the Moon Rover and hear about how we became one of the biggest space projects in Sweden.

Umeå Lunar Venture is a partnership between Space Science Sweden and Umeå University. Our main goal is to put Swedens first scientific experiment on the moon in the end of next year. And as you know we are currently preparing the measuring instrument at full speed to make this happen!

The Innovation Fair is a opportunity for anyone who is interested in learning more about our work. You will get the chance to meet the Moon Rover that is taking us to the moon and it’s creators (Part-Time Scientists) who is coming all the way from Germany. And of course the students from the engineering and physics programme will be there!

Down below you can see the programme for the day and evening. Feel free to invite your friends and help us spread the word!

For some time we have been planning to have Discovery visit our lab and on Wednesday they came by. They did a report about the Umeå Lunar Venture project that will air in the near future (we will link it here). Anyway, here are some pictures from the their visit.

As some of you might already know we attended ForskarFredag a few weeks ago. ForskarFredag is an open house event for the public to attend and get inspired by science. We were there and talked about our mission Umeå Lunar Venture, the moon and the electric fields that we are exploring. Here are some photos from the day.

It´s been a couple of weeks since we last wrote. Here is an update of what has happened in the project so far.

We have also done some tests in vacuum to see if the offset we’ve been having is due to static charging of the rotor when rotating in air. The result was a slightly lower offset (by about 10%), indicating that friction charging is not the main culprit. We have some other ideas, more on this in a later post.

We had a new rotor made in stainless steel. The reason is to try to avoid static charges sitting on the rotor, since aluminium oxide is an insulator. The hope is that a stainless rotor will prevent this, and so is part of our ongoing work with improving grounding.

One morning we also had a visit from SVT (Swedish Television) in our lab. They shot a short report for the evening news. You can read their story here (in Swedish).

On Thursday this week some of the students from the Umeå Lunar Venture crew are flying to Gothenburg to attend the Fysikdagarna conference at Chalmers University of Technology. Preparations for the trip are at full speed! We will write about the experience in a later post. Remember to subscribe via RSS and follow our Instagram and Facebook accounts for instant updates!

Last week we got new sensor amplifier cards plus some much-awaited instrument amplifiers with pin controllable gain (AD8253). With maximum amplification we get a nice, strong 600 mV signal for a field strength of around 300 V/m. With a reference voltage of 2.5 V and ADC noise around 5.5 µV (ADS1274) this means we should be able to measure fields up to 1.25 MV/m down to 2.75 mV/m (assuming no extra noise). In other words, 8½ digits of dynamic range.

We have also started experimenting with electroplating. Electroplating is the technique of coating one metal with a thin layer of another metal on-top of the first one. Mostly it is done to give the first, often cheaper metal, better characteristics to withstand oxides, or to give it other properties such as better electric conductivity or thermal insulating capabilities. It has been used for a long time and primarily we get in contact with it in the auto industry. The big, shiny bumpers of older American cars is chrome-plated. This has been done on-top of a cheaper metal, iron, in order to give it and rustproof coating and, of course, for the design. We on the other hand is experimenting in coating our aluminum structure with copper and in the future nickle and gold. This has two purposes. One, we know that the shutter-plate of the sensor is covered by a layer of aluminum oxide and this is acting like an insulator and builds a static charge. This in turn is giving us an offset in the data from the sensor it self. Secondly, we need to gold coat the structure for thermal reasons.

As we wrote in a earlier post we attended ForskarFredag, an EU supported international event, this Friday. The event is targeted towards a younger audience. So this week have also been much about figuring out how to explain what we do in a rather simplified way. It was actually not as easy as you may think and demanded the group to summon all of our pedagogical skills and a bit of guesswork, but eventually we came up with a demonstration about static electricity. It contained a plastic box, styrofoam packaging peanuts and a Van Der Graaf generator. The setup was designed to show what happens to the dust on the lunar surface when it gets charged by the sun during the day and the cosmic radiation during the night. The plastic box was our mini moon and had a sheet of aluminum foil in the bottom to act as a “lunar-ground”. On-top of this we had the packaging peanuts as stand-in lunar dust. To get the peanuts to levitate we took the anode of the Van Der Graaf generator an placed it above the, now charged, peanuts and let them levitate. Once they touch the anode, they dissipate their charge and fall down towards the ground and gets recharged again. It seemed pretty appreciated by the children, and also by the adults. If you are following our Instagram account (@spacesciencesweden) you may already have seen some content from the evening. We had a couple from our PR team with us, whom were filming and took a lot of photos. A summary of the event will be up on the blog soon!

As we wrote before we really want to engage students in the project. This week we started with an announcement about the opportunity to be involved in the project for students interested in either technology or physics. It gladly seems like we reached out and have got response from students who are interested in joining the team and the mission. Next week we can hopefully welcome some new faces to the project and therefore make the work more efficient.

A part from that this week has overall been about developing, programming and testing.

During the summer course some of the students in the electronics team developed a motor driver circuit to power and control the motors for the fieldmill. Unfortunately they could not finish the programing of the driver circuit. This week we have started to program the drivers and see how we configure them to power the motors in the fieldmil. To do this we have used a USB to I2C adapter since the chip uses I2C. But, we had a setback when the equipment to communicate from the computer to the chip failed and we don’t know why. But it is good to get these faults now so we can trace them to their source and fix it if it has something to do with our design.

On Monday we tested a new design of the fieldmill sensor with some updates. Preliminary results show some improvements to the signals. The main difference with this new design is that we can change the shunt-resistance to measure the current from the fieldmill.

The images abow show the results of running the system with 1 MOhm vs 10 MOhm. The shapes of the curves agree nicely with the theory in the literature.

A part from all of this we also have started to prepare ourself for an upcoming event next week called Forskarfredag. We will describe this further in a upcoming blogpost so stay updated!

It’s been a while since we last wrote, the blog has had a small break now that the summer course has ended. However, the project is not over and from now on we will update the blog at least once a week. We will try to keep you as updated as possible. Unfortunately, we cannot share everything with you since some of the information is classified.

Right now we have been having a lot of meetings about future events and the continuation of the project. The summer course has been very helpful for the project and we feel like we want to continue the collaboration with the students of Umeå University. According to them the summer course has really taught them a lot and many of them wants to keep being involved in the project, which of course we see as a big plus!

If you’ve been attentive you might’ve noticed that the project has appeared in some media outlets here in Sweden. This is something we feel really proud about and therefore we are going to make a page on our website with all the press related material. This will make it easier to keep track of what the press has to say about the project. For now, you’ll have to settle with the links below. (swedish)

As some of you may already know, TV4 Nyheterna visited us in the beginning of August. They did a report about our current mission, Umeå Lunar Venture. So if you’re eager to know more about it and listen to some of the fantastic people working on the project, watch this.

//This summer the Electronics team have spent their time producing a power supply circuit board, a brushless motor driver board and programming a microcontroller to be able to control the motors of the experiment. We’ve gone from knowing absolutely nothing about electronics to actually knowing a little bit, and being able to read and understand datasheets is not a bad thing!

The power supply card that we designed and built is capable of delivering a variation of different voltages – plus/minus 12 volts, plus/minus 9 volts and plus 3.3 volts. The voltage of 9 volts is needed for the operational amplifiers that are used in the experimental part of the cube, and the voltage of 3.3 volts is used to power the microcontroller.

The brushless motor driver card have been a bit problematic – not because of the design since it does actually work, but configuration-wise. The card is capable of spinning a motor, but it’s a bit of tweaking left before we can make the motors spin in a way we are happy with.

Of course lots of things have gone wrong – circuitboards that have been designed a bit goofy, short circuits that burned components, faulty code, etching that went wrong and coffee that went cold. But all in all we are happy with what we have accomplished and feel that it has been a good learning experience working with this project.